Need to install Windows driver without Windows?

[tamathews01]

I have just completed my first build, and have run into problems installing windows 7 from CD. (It was cheaper to buy a windows 7 CD and an optical drive instead of buying windows 10).

However, I am using a Samsung 950 PRO SSD, and windows 7 won't recognise that it is there. It is correctly installed, the BIOS has no trouble finding it. I am told this is because windows 7 needs a driver, but I don't know how I can install the driver without having windows first? Is there some way to install a driver from BIOS?

My old PC doesn't have an M.2 slot for me to install it on another computer, and my old hard drive has OEM windows 10, so I cant copy it over either.

Would be incredibly grateful if anyone knows of a solution.

 

[Emerald]

what is the make and model of the motherboard?

is there an option in the BIOS to configure the M.2 as SATA insted of PCIe?

 

[tamathews01]

what is the make and model of the motherboard?

is there an option in the BIOS to configure the M.2 as SATA insted of PCIe?

The motherboard is an ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Hero Alpha.

And no there is no option to configure it as SATA, manual says it auto detects if the drive is PCIe or SATA, and disables other stuff as needed

 

[hang-the-9]

If you make a USB boot setup of Windows, you can copy the chipset drivers to the USB stick and point the Windows setup to that when it asks. Another thing that may work is changing the drive type from AHCI to ATA (or Legacy), but that will cause a bit of a performance hit with the hard drives.

 

[tamathews01]

If you make a USB boot setup of Windows, you can copy the chipset drivers to the USB stick and point the Windows setup to that when it asks. Another thing that may work is changing the drive type from AHCI to ATA (or Legacy), but that will cause a bit of a performance hit with the hard drives.

I have tried putting the NVMe driver from Samsungs website on both USB and DVD and each time says it cant find any signed drivers, am I being silly somehow? I put them on as exe files, but do i need to mount them or convert them to ISO somehow in order to use them at this stage?

 

[hang-the-9]

It won't work as .exe files, you need to expand the files. Download 7zip and you should be able to extract the files from those driver files.

 

[tamathews01]

It won't work as .exe files, you need to expand the files. Download 7zip and you should be able to extract the files from those driver files.

When i expand the zip file i find : .bbs, .data, .idata, .itext, .rdata, .text, .tls, and two file files.
Burned them onto the DVD and windows gave the same message ( couldn't find and signed drivers)
Do i need to exclude some of them?

 

[tamathews01]

Right, finally solved it, so thanks for the help

So the solution, download the driver onto DVD, insert, and allow it to use this to find the SSD.

In this case, unpacking the NVMe driver samsung provided did not work, because it didn't contain a .inf file, however I was able to find the correct driver here : https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/3rvoop/samsung_950_pro_nvme_ssd_windows_7_64/